BP/US Government Have Destroyed the Gulf. Oil Continues to Flow

by: Stu Piddy

Mon Jul 19, 2010 at 01:20:06 AM EDT

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/07...

"The US government has ordered BP to report on a "detected seep" and other "anomalies" near the Gulf of Mexico oil well as experts monitor the seabed for cracks after the months-long gusher was capped.

"Given the current observations from the test, including the detected seep a distance from the well and undetermined anomalies at the well head, monitoring of the seabed is of paramount importance during the test period," Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said in a letter to BP chief managing director Bob Dudley."

In other words the cap they put on not only didn't work it forced the oil out of the damaged pipe line and now it has created new venues from which to flow below the sea bed and up to the surface and there is no way in hell they are ever going to stop it now.

But it won't be reported like that. Maybe in two years. Not for a long time. You will be hearing only about the next gimmick to stop the oil.  

What To Do In Case Of An "Internet Kill Switch"

by: Jack's Smirking Revenge

Sat Jul 17, 2010 at 22:13:09 PM EDT

Proposed Internet Kill Switch

The Green New Deal, by 'Green Change'

by: fairleft

Sat Jul 17, 2010 at 20:08:36 PM EDT

Green Change's new campaign: the Green New Deal

. . . The Green New Deal is our answer to the economic and ecological problems facing communities around the world.

The Green New Deal is a platform of policies aimed at creating broadly shared economic prosperity and effecting the transition to a sustainable civilization. . . .

Sign onto the Coalition for a Green New Deal today.

Here's what you endorse by joining the Coalition for a Green New Deal:

THE GREEN NEW DEAL

1.  Cut military spending at least 70%.

2.  Create millions of green union jobs through massive public investment in renewable energy, mass transit and conservation.

3.  Set ambitious, science-based greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, and enact a revenue-neutral carbon tax to meet them.

4.  Establish single-payer "Medicare for all" health care.

5.  Institute tuition-free public higher education.

6.  Change trade agreements to improve labor, environmental, consumer, health and safety standards.

7.  End counterproductive prohibition policies and legalize marijuana.

8.  Enact tough limits on credit card interest and lending rates, progressive tax reform and strict financial regulation.

9.  Amend the U.S. Constitution to abolish corporate personhood.

10. Pass sweeping electoral, campaign finance and anti-corruption reforms.

Juuuun-d'AAAAAALAHHHHH _open thread_

by: Laura

Fri Jul 16, 2010 at 23:39:41 PM EDT

Git. Er. Done.

Sea of Glass. Etc.

Dead mark.

"Turncoat [??] Afghan soldier kills 3 British troopers"

by: fairleft

Tue Jul 13, 2010 at 20:01:04 PM EDT

"Turncoat Afghan soldier kills 3 British troopers"

That's the AP headline on Yahoo news at the moment. Hard. to. take. sometimes. So he's not a turncoat when he fights and kills for the US/UK occupation and its Karzai puppet, who was allowed to steal the last national election, but he is a turncoat when he joins the fighting majority trying to kick out the foreigners occupying a country, his country, for the fun and profit of those foreigners' corporations and politicians?

But the UK Guardian gets it worse:

Renegade Afghan kills three British soldiers
[subhead:] Murder of troops inside Helmand patrol base deals severe blow to government's Afghanistan exit strategy

Okay, yeah, I get it, 'renegade', so you can get in this connotation from dictionary.com:

-adjective
3. of or like a renegade; traitorous.

And murder? . . .

Rand Paul: "Being Poor Kicks Ass!"

by: Chip

Tue Jul 13, 2010 at 13:11:24 PM EDT

Man, I wish Rand Paul had been around back in 1998 when I was just an eighth grader and my dad was still a truck driver. My dad, Chip Sr., was one of those enigmas of the working-class, a dude who loved the union but consistently voted Republican. Anyway, we were one of those hardworking families with a firm grip on our bootstraps, and we were this close to being upwardly mobile when disaster struck: My mom, who was unemployed but had been studying to be a nurse, got very sick and Chip Sr. suffered a neck injury while driving a tanker truck. Both were out of work for over a year.

Now, at the time, I was the only member of the Witley family to have a job; before my parents' ailments, I was employed part-time as a golf course landscaper out in the suburbs, a wonderful gated community in which everyone had American flag logos on their back windshields. My pittance of a paycheck along with my father's workman's compensation (which didn't pay his full rate or include the overtime he desperately worked to pay our bills) didn't come close to keeping us afloat. Mind you, I won't say we qualified as 'poor'. Surely, the housing projects a half a mile down the road kept our self-pity to a reasonable level but we were, understand, very very very broke.

I was scared, of course. We had little food and were on the verge of losing our home. Although it would have helped immensely at the time, thank God my family didn't qualify for welfare or Section 8 housing; had we received it, we'd surely be African American communists today. But I had nightmares of being homeless, to be sure. Yet if Rand Paul were around, he would have told me to calm my fragile nerves: Indeed, the poor in America don't have it so bad.

The other day at the Senate Candidate Forum, Randy The Dandy explained to listeners the fortunes of the American poor. What with all of those color TVs and cheap fast food joints, underclass Americans enjoy fruits of Western Civilization unheard of in less freedom-loving third world nations, like Russia, Somalia, and Sweden. Those poor dregs are, as we speak, munching on cockroach legs and scrawling images on cave walls by candlelight. Meanwhile, the American poor are living the good life, kicking back in their armchairs in wonderful public housing units, conveniently located near several liquor stores, Korean groceries, and dope corners filled to the brim with jubilant youngsters exercising their Second Amendment rights with gleeful enthusiasm, all while wearing the finest bootleg fashions, punctuated with pleasing-to-the-eye color-coded red and blue bandannas.

Had The Dandy been on the public stage, he would have brought the haughty lifestyle of the American poor to my attention. Paul, of course, comes from a truly freedom-loving family. Big daddy Ron Paul is much more of a freedom-lover than my father; if Chip Sr. had even a fraction of Ron's American Spirit, he too would have been a physician rather than a humble forklift operator-turned-truck driver. And the wonders of free market capitalism, with all of it's meritocracy awesomeness, have worked well for Randy The Dandy: No doubt that Randy would have become an eye surgeon-turned-senate hopeful regardless of his father's robust income. Because America is all about individual achievements and having upper-middle class parents with political connections has nothing to do with one's ability to properly yank his bootstraps.

Anyway, my family should have listened to Randy The Dandy's favorite icons. Had Ayn Rand and Ronald Regan been at my house, they would have pointed out that our woes were, in the end, our own fault. You see, good Americans save money and plan for disaster. My father should have known that driving a tractor-trailer can have negative impacts on one's spinal cord and my mother, God bless her, should have foreseen her ailment and squirreled away funds for those rainy days when, out of nowhere, she'd literally pass out from her blood pressure disorder. Personal responsibility is, you know, a very important trait in American life. We should have known better than to curse at all those seemingly unfortunate incidents. Chip Sr.'s slipped disks and my mom's life-threatening health woes could have all been avoided had they possessed just a bit more Red, White, and Blue chuztpah.

My anxiety about my family's rough patch was nothing to worry about. For if the American poor are so well off, the US working-class is practically of the country club variety. Even when the often-sensitive financial situations of blue collar folks tumble into ruin, we can rest assured that the worst outcome - descending into poverty - isn't all too bad.

Thank you, Randy The Dandy, for showing us the wonderful truth!  

Fresh Prince in the Era of the Info Boob Tubes

by: donkeytale

Wed Jul 07, 2010 at 10:44:19 AM EDT

Possibly, and yet the internet binds us in multiple new prisons of our choosing, making it easy to identify us as consumers in ready-made subdivided categories to the marketers who have long since created/controlled our desires and dreams in the garish material world of modern capitalism.

No wonder advertising rates are down. The products no longer are required to hunt for us. We are captured, and the tags identifying us are clearly marked on each cage.

Caught in an invisible web, which differs from the 1940s only in that today we are connected by the newly improved media technology as "users", more tightly bound than ever, and thus less likely than ever to create anything new or different to challenge the hard wired totalitarianism inherent in the infoboobtubez era.

The internet revolutionized global capitalism and yet all we hear is the forever delusional attempt to convince ourselves that the internet is a tool for human freedom, when in fact the internet simply adds a more efficient, invisible lock on the jail cell of mass conformity than radio TV or movies ever could, albeit through sub categorization of the mass into non-dialectically-minded-conformists-within-the-subgroup.

All brought to us in living colour within the safety of our delusions by the Global Infotainment Industry.

'Chairman Steele, Afghanistan truth is taboo!'

by: fairleft

Sat Jul 03, 2010 at 22:46:43 PM EDT

This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. . . .

It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.

Wow, refreshing, a normal person might at first react. Admittedly, you could question the beginning of the statement, since we all know Bush started the Afghan war; but it is also true that after deposing the Taliban Bush kept the war on low or simmer for the rest of his time in office. And Obama has turned the heat way up, doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan (and unleashing McChrystal's assassination squads there, btw). In that reasonable benefit-of-the-doubt context, Steele's first two sentences above are accurate. But oh, what a second paragraph: right on Mr. Steele, and take that, warmongers!

As you'd expect, military-industrial complex and warmonger Republicans are on the anti-Steele warpath. And the other war party, the Democrats, are also attacking Steele, nearly accusing him of treason (yup, that sounds Bush-era familiar). As if we haven't known it for awhile, the party and President swooped into office by peacenik votes is also the other 'support the war or it'll make the troops feel bad' party:

The Republican Party-The Party of Peace

by: Stu Piddy

Fri Jul 02, 2010 at 21:16:55 PM EDT

In the house of "representatives" 215 Democrats voted to fund the war vs O REPUBLICANS.

Republicans stand unanimously against the War in Afghanistan.

The Republicans are the party of peace and the Democrats the party that seeks to defend America through military force.

We must stop the Republicans from gaining seats in November.

All the top Blogs should unite in this effort. Led by Daily Kos the blog community must put it's petty differences aside and stand united behind the Democrats to prevent the Republicans from gaining control of the funding for the Afghan war.

I call on top progressive blogs like Daily Kos, what are some of the other top ones? Booman Tribunal, My Left Wing, World Wide Left...you know WHO you are. I mean, you, really know WHO you are! You supported Obama damnit. Not the Republicans! Your the people who care! The ones who really understand stuff. Like what's really going on in this country.

Right Wing Evangelicals Oppose Comcast/NBC Merger (?)

by: Chip

Fri Jul 02, 2010 at 13:21:20 PM EDT

As much as I love democracy, it can be scary, especially in America. There is but one fragile, sometimes porous group standing between sanity and a Christian theocracy. Mind you, I'm not contending a Christian theocracy in the US would be similar to, let's say, Saudi Arabia. I doubt there'd be honor killings...or at least not that many. A Christian theocracy in America would look like the Disney Channel, only not as profane, with less Jews and more Kirk Cameron. And a mishmashy, not-nearly-coalesced  group of relatively intelligent folks fortunately stand in the way of this theocracy, mostly by fucking more often than right-wing Christians. Anyway, this morning I actually thought I'd found common ground between we, the sane and humbly intelligent citizens, and those who'd rather dangle on Jesus' hairy nipples. I was wrong.

As I perused AVN.com's articles today, I thought I found a hopeful nugget about a coalition of Christly dingleberries - headed by the Parents Television Council (PTC) and Focus on the Family (FOTF) - opposing the upcoming merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal. I said to myself, "Wow, these people are usually mindless trollops but hey, this merger of media giants is going to limit our already-shrinking freedom of choice in media. Good on them for defending freedom of choice!"

Except this coalition has very little interest in matters of choice (unless it's the choice between which "textbook" best invalidates carbon dating methods, on sale for just ten bucks at the mega-church bookstore). The coalition's primary concern? They're super pissed about Comcast making money off skin flicks. Surely, they believe this merger of television monoliths will result in an unending wave of up close anal penetration scenes flooding the airwaves and thus transforming their wholesome white babies into homosexual drug addicts.

Well you shouldn't be surprised. PTC and FOTF are notoriously anti-porn. (In fact, both groups are anti-everything that isn't wholesomely Christian...in a right wing sort of way. Just how Jesus said it should be, or some shit.) As there is no empirical evidence that pornography harms consenting adults who view it, these knuckleheads - and indeed, most right wing anti-porn activists - instead attack the adult industry with stupid, arbitrary buzzwords like "obscenity" and "indecency". Of course, there's no way objectively judge what's 'obscene' and what isn't. For instance, I don't believe sex is obscene at all. Yet PTC and FOTF do, and they try as hard as they can to censor it...and usually succeed because our nation has a bunch of retardedly arbitrary obscenity laws.

Porn isn't their only target, obviously. They oppose any kind of supposedly naughty stuff in the media.  Even children's cartoon characters are targeted for, ya know, telling people to be nice to each other. For example, FOTF founder James Dobson bitched to the FCC when SpongeBob SquarePants sang a song about being open minded and tolerant, because that was obviously meant to turn children into homosexuals.

Once again, these boogers of Christ show themselves as apathetic towards democracy and freedom of choice. Oh yeah, they run to the polls to oppress fags and, closeted racists that they are, oppose any sort of multiculturalism. But when the issue of the day is yet another corporate merger which, by it's very nature, takes a big capitalistic dump on the average American's freedom of choice, the right wing faithful could care less...unless Comcast shows a few titties now and then.

I guess they don't care about a handful of wealthy cunts controlling information. As long as it's titty-free and shows re-runs of the 700 Club, anyway.